Sharon Street (NYU) has posted Constructivism About Reasons on the web. Here is a taste:
Do valuable things possess their value independently of our valuing them? Or does their value always depend, at least ultimately, on our taking them to be valuable? I have argued elsewhere that Darwinian considerations settle this debate in favor of the latter, antirealist view. Things are valuable ultimately because we take them to be. But the ultimately in this statement is important. While there are, ultimately, no normative truths that hold independently of our evaluative attitudes—while normative realism is false, in other words—it does not follow that it’s impossible to go wrong with one’s normative judgments. On the contrary, there is still a robust sense in which normative judgments can be, and often are, in error. This is the important core of truth in realism. The truth in antirealism, however—and what makes antirealism the right view in the end—is that the standards of correctness that determine what counts as an error are ultimately set by our own normative judgments. To put the point another way: A person does not have a normative reason merely in virtue of her taking herself to have it; it’s easy to go wrong about one’s reasons, and we do so all the time. At the same time, however, the reasons a person has are always ultimately a function of the reasons she takes herself to have; any mistakes she makes will, in the end, be on her own terms.
This is a sketch of the view I’ll call metaethical constructivism. Constructivism is increasingly mentioned and discussed in the contemporary metaethical debate, but there are relatively few developed statements of the view, and persisting puzzlement about exactly what constructivism is and whether it constitutes a metaethical position, much less a distinct one, at all. The goal of this paper is to offer a systematic statement of constructivism that responds to these questions. I propose a general characterization and taxonomy of constructivist views in ethics, and then present the main outlines of the constructivist metaethical view I favor.
This paper is important if you are interested in metaethics or in a deeper understanding of Rawls’s political constructivism and its relationship to and differences from general constructivism in ethics. Highly recommended.